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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 9:42:27 GMT 10
Clancy of the Overflow I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago, He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just "on spec", addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow". And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are." In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars. I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste. And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal -- But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow".A.B. “Banjo” PatersonAustralian poet (Waltzing Matilda) (Born this day 1864) And his voice can be heard as you pass by the billabong, "Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me"
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 9:43:38 GMT 10
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability
Let the reader ... attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred gener- ations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty- four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened
In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research. By temperament and training, the research worker is the antithesis of the pundit. What he is actively and constantly aware of is his ignorance, not his knowledge; the insufficiency of his concepts, of the terms and phrases in which he tries to excogitate his problems: not their final and exhaustive sufficiency. He is, therefore, usually only a good teacher for the few who wish to use their mind as a workshop, rather than a warehouse
More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track
The null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis
The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned
The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmeticRonald A. FisherEnglish statistician, evolutionary biologist and geneticist (Born this day 1890) To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 9:45:05 GMT 10
The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power
Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene
Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is
Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place
The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival
Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry
All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite anotherHans MorgenthauGerman-American international political theorist ( Politics Among Nations) (Born this day 1904) When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 10:04:06 GMT 10
Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene Hans MorgenthauFrom this we may conclude that the desire for power is neither universal nor psychologically innate but rather that, strategically, societies which perpetuate the meme of hierarchical dominance tend to prevail over others. Without constant vigilance, this strategy can all too easily lead us slip further into the barbaric ideology of "might makes right." Civilization is a thin and fragile veneer which requires of its citizens perpetual empathy, cooperation, self-restraint, and even a degree of self-sacrifice to endure and hopefully progress.
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 10:04:49 GMT 10
While living I want to live well
The soldiers never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged, but reported the misdeeds of the Indians
There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say
I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures
When a child, my mother taught me to kneel and pray to Usen for strength, health, wisdom and protection. Sometimes we prayed in silence, sometimes each one prayed aloud; sometimes an aged person prayed for all of us...
I had no weapon, nor did I hardly wish to fight, neither did I contemplate recovering the bodies of my loved ones, for that was forbidden
I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trustGeronimo (Goyaalé)Bedonkohe Apache chief (Apache Wars) (Died this day 1908) We took an oath not to do any wrong to each other or to scheme against each other
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 10:05:36 GMT 10
I was born in Melbourne with a precious gift. Dame Nature stooped over my cot and gave me this gift. It was the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others
My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia
Oh, I was down by Manly Pier drinking tubes of ice-cold beer with a bucket full of prawns upon me knee. But when I'd swallowed the last prawn I had a technicolour yawn and I chundered in the old Pacific sea
My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more
Australia is an outdoor country. People only go indoors to use the toilet, and that's only a recent development
I still seem to shock people even though I look terribly respectable now in my old age ... I think what I do is encourage people to look at Australia critically and with affection and humour, which is what all comedians should do
Dame Edna Everage housewife, megastar, investigative journalist, social anthropologist, children's book illustrator, diseuse, chanteuse, swami, monstre sacré, polymath, adviser to British royalty, grief counsellor, spin doctor and icon is arguably the most popular and gifted woman in the world today...Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage) Australian multimedia megastar (Born this day 1934) Hello possums!
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 10:09:14 GMT 10
The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done
If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in the bus in Montgomery, she'd still be standing
Racial tensions are a major problem in the states in which the (church) burnings took place
Stereotyped by the media, ignored by politicians, young poor black males face almost insurmountable obstacles to fulfilling the American dream
Everywhere, African-Americans were stopped far out of their proportion in any of the communities policed
When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe
Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunitiesDr. Mary Frances BerryUS social historian, Human Rights advocate and legal expert (Born this day 1938) When it comes to the cause of justice, I take no prisoners and I don't believe in compromise
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 17, 2014 10:09:56 GMT 10
Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourselfJiddu KrishnamurtiIndian philosopher (Kingdom Happiness) (Died this day 1986) It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:52:32 GMT 10
Tuesday’s Quotes:Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying
The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider ... the riders contend for its possession
If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there
I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men
I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.
I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self
I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the AntichristMartin LutherGerman biblical scholar and religious reformer (Died this day 1546) Peace if possible, truth at all costs
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:53:34 GMT 10
Genius is eternal patience
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free
What do you despise? By this you are truly known
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all
I am still learningMichelangeloItalian artist and sculptor (Sistine Chapel, David) (Died this day 1564) Self-portrait, from his final paintingMy soul I resign to God, my body to the earth, my worldly goods to my next of kin(last words)
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